Cloudflare have suffered five major outages in 2025 already. They have suffered more though if you check their status page here.

Here’s a list of the more significant outages / incidents for Cloudflare in 2025, based on publicly-available post-mortems and status-history. It may not include every minor event or regional disruption, but captures those with broad impact.

Date	Incident Description	Impact Summary
6 Feb 2025	R2 object-storage service outage. The Cloudflare Blog+1	~59 minutes of full failure of R2, affecting services built on it (Images, Stream, Cache Reserve, etc.). No data loss.
21 Mar 2025	Credential rotation error impacting R2 gateway and several dependent services. The Cloudflare Blog+1	~1 hour 7 minutes of elevated error rates: 100% write failures and ~35% read failures in R2; spill-over impact to other services.
12 Jun 2025	Service outage affecting Workers KV, Access, WARP, Cloudflare dashboard. The Cloudflare Blog	Up to 2 hours 28 minutes of service disruption across multiple product lines.
14 Jul 2025	Outage of the 1.1.1.1 public DNS resolver and edge service topology change. The Cloudflare Blog	~62 minutes of downtime for users of the resolver/edge service—less visible in enterprise production but still significant.
18 Nov 2025	Large-scale global outage affecting many major Internet services. The Cloudflare Blog+1	A configuration file bug in the Bot Management feature caused widespread service disruption across many customers and platforms.

For a company positioned at the heart of the Internet, (handling roughly 45% they claim of all website traffic. Akamai stand by 30% of all website traffic on their network) that’s a serious prompt to rethink risk management, network resilience, and vendor strategy. And yet… the industry seems strangely quiet.

The truth is simple: an outage is not just an inconvenience. It is an unplanned incident with real business impact. Whether the interruption lasts seconds or hours, the outcome is the same: customers can’t transact, services fail, confidence is lost, and revenue disappears. When your CDN, WAF, or cloud security layer goes down, so does your brand.

And in 2025, that’s not good enough.

Why Cloudflare Outages Matter for Enterprise Customers

Let’s be clear. We’re not talking about Cloudflare’s free tier. That traffic accounts for a huge proportion of their volumes (see above), but it’s not where the real operational risk lies.

The concern is for the paid tiers — the retailers, household names and global brands that depend on Cloudflare for:

• Content delivery network (CDN)

• Web and API application security

• DDoS protection

• Website performance optimisation

• Zero Trust security
  
• DNS
  

These organisations cannot afford downtime. They need always-on availability, predictable uptime, and enterprise-grade network reliability. “Mostly works” isn’t good enough. Providing transparency in the wash up. All very nice and very pretty, but doesn’t get your lost revenue or lost customers back for the fifth time this year.

For enterprise/IT usage ITogether cares most about incidents affecting backbone infrastructure or cloud providers (wider reach and customer service impact).

The Economics Behind the Instability

Cloudflare built rapid market share using a classic tactic: give away core services for free and scale fast. But free customers don’t fund enterprise-grade infrastructure. To win big logos, they’ve had to undercut more established competitors (Akamai), and that creates pressure. What we have for years called the race to zero. Zero profit.

Take Ikea as a real-world example. A significantly cheaper Cloudflare proposal reportedly helped them move away from Akamai, the long-time market leader in global CDN services, web security, and application delivery. But after multiple outages, any savings have been swallowed by lost sales, reputational impact, and operational disruption.

This is what we call the race to zero.

Short-term savings, long-term pain.

There are no winners.

Are we Ignoring the Obvious?

Every time Cloudflare suffer an outage, LinkedIn fills up with applause for their “transparency” in post-incident reports. Transparency is good, but reliability is better.

In 2025, sending apology emails to customers because your CDN provider went down should be a thing of the past. Businesses deserve better than crossed fingers and public status pages.

Akamai remain the most mature, stable and globally resilient option — proven at massive scale for more than twenty years. And it’s not the only example of reliability winning out:

Check Point vs Fortinet – stability and cyber security still separate them by miles

Check Point Harmony / Avanan vs Mimecast – real-world tests speak for themselves

Yet many organisations stick with familiar brands out of habit, fear of change, or the belief that the market is “good enough”.

What should IT, Network & Cybersecurity Leaders Do Now?

• Review CDN providers and pressure-test your suppliers

• Look beyond headline IT cost savings

• Check outage history, SLAs, and resilience

• Assess alternatives with an independent network security partner

Run a proper market review every 12–18 months.

This isn’t about churn for the sake of it — it’s about due diligence, resilience, and protecting revenue.

ITogether work with 50+ leading network and cyber security vendors — including Akamai, (and Cloudflare) Check Point and more — to give you an impartial, expert view of your options.

Ready to review your edge, CDN or security stack? Contact us today:

📞 0113 341 0123

📧 hello@itogether.com